Friday, May 28, 2010

mark is my friend and as you can see, a fabulous photographer. i was torn as to which series of his to post about, but i chose this one because of his sensitivity to the buildings of the jersey shore-a place where i grew up in the summers as well as the awesome use of rich color and attention to pattern and repetitive line...see lots more work here.

i've posted about philadelphia wireman a long time ago (see this post), but i feel his work is worth another look and i found a site with a large inventory of his sculptures pictured online. see the above post for a great statement about the artist. i look at his work quite often as i'm drawn in by the sinuous lines, the act of wrapping and the fabulous use of found materials...see more here.

recently, i read alan weisman's fabulous book the world without us. i was amazed a the theory of extinction and disintegration he postulates. the grounded facts of the rapidity with which the natural world would overtake man-made detritus upon the cessation of the human species was sobering at best...apocalyptic at worst. my own on-going and growing disenchantment with the negative impact of humans on the world has led to my art practice of forming pieces that morph human detritus with little-shop-of-horrors-type, hyper-real, nature-gone-wild-soul.

this work interests me because the artist has taken the craft of felting beyond most of what i've seen. the work possesses a sophisticated palette and the artist has created some unique, approachable and interesting multiple forms and installations, i'd really like to see this work in person...read the entire statement here and see lots more work here.

Friday, May 21, 2010

Otter Falls is a site in the Catskills that I drew and photographed over a period of ten years. While on the Bowery in 2001, I did a set of ink drawings to interpret my feelings of the site. These black and white brush drawings were the beginning of this current series of paintings. Each painting begets the next. The feeling of the original site has become an "abstract" space that has taken on a life of it's own as it develops in each new painting. This moves me from depicting landscape to exploring Nature beyond landscape's visual beauty: green is made of yellow and blue; earth–brown is red and black; light is white (in the spectrum, all the colors). My explorations are improvisations based on nature built with the primary colors of red, yellow, and blue. This is the form that I've arrived at to do a series of 12 paintings: a static square made dynamic by black and white made from red yellow, and blue–expressing the notion of vibrations evolving into shapes as a play on the quantum world of "wave particle duality"–to play the shapes as a musical composition–done six foot square as a human scale.

at first glance, it's difficult to tell from their hard-edged graphic nature that these paintings are derived from landscape, but after reading the statement , i find them particularly intriguing...see more here.

Thursday, May 20, 2010

another awesome artist discovery from fiberart international, her pieces are beautiful in the images, but to see them in person is to appreciate their impressive size, the craftsmanship, the sum of the parts and the beauty of the parts themselves...see more here.

All art is made out of things. All things are made out of stuff. All stuff is made from other stuff. All other stuff is made from particular material substances. All things of substance are made from substances without substance. All substances are made from matter. All matter is made from atoms. All atoms are made from all the same stuff. Everything that matters depends upon stuff…

i, myself, have a vast collection of craft punches that i use to obliterate high end home and fashion magazines...i love his statement and i'm inspired by what he does with craft punches...see more here.

this is another amazing artist whose work i first saw at fiberart international, 2007 and rediscovered when i visited fiberart international this year in pittsburgh (see here for the fiberart international post and here, here and here for posts about other artists i encountered during this trip). i was and still remain impressed with the intricacy of the tiny worlds she creates in the tiniest needle lace stitches. these extremely intimate pieces become room sized installations when lit correctly as to make use of the shadows. to see these pieces in person is the best way to appreciate them...see more here.

Monday, May 17, 2010

this is another artist whose work i had the pleasure of viewing at the pca in pittsburgh. it's difficult to see in these images, but there is definite control of the surface through the use of paint masking as well as her decision to leave some areas of the wood base unpainted. despite this obvious control, she manages to create extremely expressive and beautifully emotional paintings that suggest the chaos and order of nature and landscape...see more here.

Friday, May 14, 2010

Paper has been used for communication since its invention; either between humans or in an attempt to communicate with the spirit world. I employ this delicate, accessible medium and use irreversible, destructive processes to reflect on the precariousness of the world we inhabit and the fragility of our life, dreams and ambitions.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

My current work aims to create a textbook of geologic processes - as if each piece were a page from a reference book, illustrating cross-sections of imagined terrains. These paintings are built up thickly around embedded sculptural elements, and then excavated and eroded down to reveal what was buried. Like rockfaces or archaeological sites, their layers reveal the history of their making and can be read like the lines of a story.

everything she's done in the past few years has been so exciting and it just keeps getting better and better...see more work and an interesting video here.

important words

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